WASHINGTON NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe drew a limp salute at best when he ran his long-awaited vision for the space agency up the Capitol Hill flagpole, making it more likely that Congress will rewrite the Bush Administration’s NASA spending request for Fiscal 2003 to reflect its own priorities.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER The International Space Station’s complex new TRW robotic mobile rail transporter is now operational along with the rest of the station’s new Boeing S-Zero truss following the departure of the shuttle Atlantis crew.

WASHINGTON NASA temporarily set aside a longsimmering internal dispute over replacing or upgrading the space shuttle in order to defend its long-term space transportation plans against congressional questioners last week. Members of the House Science space and aeronautics subcommittee pressed the top officials from NASA’s aerospace technology and spaceflight offices on how they plan to reconcile shuttle upgrade spending with the $4.8-billion Space Launch Initiative, which seeks to develop technology for vehicles that would replace the 20-year-old shuttle fleet.

LOS ANGELES Boeing posted a $ 1.25-billion loss during the first quarter of this year, the first since 1997, primarily due to an accounting change that resulted in a charge of $1.83 billion. The loss compares to a $ 1.24-billion profit during the first quarter of 2001.

NEW YORK TRW Inc., spurning a sweetened Northrop Grumman bid to buy the company, effectively hung a “for sale” sign on its Cleveland headquarters’ front door last week by indicating it was willing to open its books to any potential buyer.

TOKYO SANFRANCISCO In a continuing drive to make the H-IIA commercially attractive, Japans science and technology ministry and National Space Development Agency want to reconfigure the vehicle’s first stage in order to lift today’s heaviest payloads into geostationary transfer orbits.

LEXINGTON, MASS., and NEW YORK When it comes to the commercialization of military technologies, most efforts by aerospace/defense contractors have been one textbook case after another of how to squander resources. But a small number of companies have figured out how the commercialization process ought to be followed and have been rewarded for their successes.